In A State of Constant Migration: Conversation With Fatma Onat
Editorial introduction by Deniz
Fatma Onat is a playwright, theatre critic and professional dramaturg. She is a friend I have known since 2012 and collaborated with since 2020. I met her in Şermola Performans, as she was part of the team, working in their studio in İstanbul; while I was an MA student working on the alternative theatre field of İstanbul and a regular audience member in all the independent stages of Beyoğlu area. Now many years later, in 2025, when we started working on this special issue with my colleagues, I wanted to interview Fatma as part of contextualizing what Inter-Asian Theatre Studies might mean today. Fatma is Kurdish, and has worked as part of Kurdish theatre in İstanbul for many years. Some of her works are translated into Kurdish, yet she writes in Turkish, not by choice but due to the long term and harmful linguistic policies of Türkiye.
In 2017 Fatma immigrated to Aotearoa New Zealand, and learned English, which by now she has become quite fluent. Looking through Fatma’s journey as a regular border crosser (in terms of both the borders of states and borders of language), we can ask questions about the potency and limits of trying to define what Inter-Asian Theatre Studies can be today. How can we place someone who crossed an internal border (within Türkiye), such as Fatma? Do collaborations between Kurdish and Turkish theatre practitioners in Türkiye count as Inter-Asian Theatre? Or how can we locate within Inter-Asian Theatre studies someone like Fatma, a Kurdish woman from Türkiye, who built solidarity bonds with the Maori theatre practitioners and academics in Aotearoa New Zealand?
This interview is aimed to open a broader field for the discussion of what our discipline is and can be.
Deniz: Hello Fatma! Can you tell us a little bit about your life in Türkiye and your educational background?
Fatma: I am part of a large family full of love and respect. I am the ninth of ten siblings. My family migrated from the southeast of Türkiye to Istanbul at the end of the 1980s. First, my oldest sister and I came. One of our uncles took care of us until my sister could stand on her feet. Then the other siblings and parents came a few years apart.
I was a child who struggled to be a good student and adapted to the biggest city in the country in the best way possible. I had to read more than everyone. I had to speak more clearly than everyone. I had to improve my knowledge more than anyone else. But even then, it wouldn’t make me exceptional; it would only make me an average student. I was coming from a ‘complicated’ place, a small Kurdish town, and I had to prove to my teacher and classmates that I was just a ‘normal student,’ like them.
Also, I was thinking that everyone’s knowledge and skills were much better than mine in the classroom. That was why I had to put as much effort as I could to be a good student. I thought reading was the best way to achieve that, and it helped me a lot. Then one of my teachers recognised I could write well. After a few acknowledgements in writing competitions and compliments from others, I discovered that I was interested in developing this skill. I was very naive at the beginning, of course, so I started using this ability to make birthday cards for my friends, write acrostic poems to make them laugh, and help friends write love letters to impress their love interests. I mean, it was nice to get schoolmates’ attention with these writing activities. I felt like I had my own power in this big city through writing. But like many families from lower-middle-class backgrounds in Türkiye, I was sent to a vocational high school to secure my future.
I started work while I was studying in high school. After school, I realized that I couldn’t keep working as an accountant, and I tried to find something else. My youngest brother Cüneyd made me aware of a private conservatory, Müjdat Gezen Sanat Merkezi (Müjdat Gezen Art School), that had scholarships. I was a lucky person, because in a big family, it is not easy to recognise someone’s ability or interest. As you can guess, it is hard to give that much attention to one of ten siblings. But my brother Cüneyd did that for me. He always encouraged me emotionally and financially; many of the things that I was able to achieve are thanks to his support. So then, in the early 2000s, I began to study Creative Writing on a scholarship at Müjdat Gezen Art School. After that, I mainly worked for a while as a copywriter and editor for sectoral magazines. My short stories have also been published in various newspapers and magazines.
I don’t know if it is good or bad, but my educational journey never ends. In my early 30s, I started studying Theatre Criticism and Dramaturgy at Istanbul University and graduated from there in my mid-30s. The one who was happiest and most proud of my never-ending education was my dad. He would be the first to read my theatre reviews in the special Sunday issues of newspapers, even though he had never seen a single theatre play in his life. I feel incredibly lucky when it comes to my family.
How did you get interested in theatre? And how did you decide to start writing plays?
The conservatory where I studied was a school that mainly provided acting education. You would see actors throwing monologues everywhere. To be honest, it was quite annoying to be exposed to nonstop theatre. They made you feel like they were the gods of the conservatory. In a way, they were, because the foundation of the conservatory was laid for them. The school was under the control of the acting department. Actors often believed that everyone actually wanted to become an actor, and that those who couldn’t ended up turning to other areas of theatre.
During my arts education, which I began with a motivation to write, I discovered the joy of playwriting, and it was in those years that I began watching plays. I mean, I am not someone whose passion for theatre began when I was a child. I started to get into theatre theory there. I loved it, but that creative writing department wasn’t a place that provided comprehensive theatre theory. Then, at the first chance, in my early 30s, I started studying exactly that at Istanbul University. I bring up my age because I really think this program hit me differently at that stage of my life.
Back in my early twenties, I don’t think I could’ve taken it in with the same love or depth. Dramaturgy is one of those things you appreciate so much more once you’ve lived a bit and collected experiences from different paths. And studying in the Dramaturgy department was the highlight of my educational journey. I realised that there was much more to do within the theatre industry than just acting. Analysing plays, watching performances, and writing reviews became my passion. It felt like I had finally found what I truly loved to do.
During my studies and after graduating, I mostly worked as a theatre critic. At the time, I was the only one among my classmates who was able to earn at least a little money from theatre criticism, because I was writing reviews for the arts and culture website of a bank (Halkbank). In May 2017, they announced that they would continue only as a “culture and lifestyle” platform. There was no longer any space for art criticism on the website. With the new restructuring, all previously published articles were also removed from the archive. Because of this, all the reviews I had written, at least twice a month for four years, became inaccessible.
This is such a massive loss of archive. I remember using your reviews as a source through this website while I was working on my master’s thesis on the alternative theatre field. Maybe this is also a good time to mention that I am very happy that we selected four reviews that you published back then and translated them to English for sharing with the global readership of Critical Stages. It is such a valuable archive that documents a very particular moment.
Thank you. I agree with you, yet it wasn’t easy to freely critique the plays I wanted to on that platform. There were boundaries — censorship, of course. That’s why I also used other platforms for theatre reviews that I couldn’t publish there. In particular, the culture and arts sections of independent media gave me the space to write without limiting myself. Around that time, I was also working with a Kurdish theatre company, Şermola Performance, which at the time was known for its strong ensemble spirit. While we were already practising many texts at school, I wrote my first professional play for that company. This happened with the encouragement of Mirza Metin, the company’s artistic director.
Can you tell us about your integration into the alternative theatre scene in Istanbul in the early 2010s? What were you feeling back then? What do you think you’ve learned after almost a decade in that field, as a playwright, dramaturg, critic, and community member?
That period felt like a time when the streets profoundly impacted theatre. Beyoğlu neighbourhood in particular was a space full of social tension, conflict, and solidarity. Our theatre venue, Şermola Performance, was also located there. During the rehearsals and performances, the noise of the street was in the foyer and sometimes reached the stage. We didn’t make theatre in isolation.
As you know, in the mid-2000s, people were first captivated by the work of Dot — one of the first independent contemporary theatre companies in Istanbul that had an immediate impact on our generation. That’s when Istanbul encountered in-yer-face theatre. It exploded in popularity. There was vomiting on stage, nudity, swearing flying through the air, actors staring into your eyes and speaking directly to you in small blackbox spaces without the emotional safety and distance of the proscenium stage — and as audience, we were genuinely thrilled. That kind of formal shock made such an impression that neither critics nor audiences really questioned the content too deeply. It was a time of excitement, mostly driven by translated plays.
But as we moved toward the late 2000s and early 2010s, things started to change. It became time to tell the stories of those who were children in the ’80s and ’90s by utilizing the new theatrical tools that particularly Dot theatre exposed us to. Theatre began to gain momentum in both quality and quantity. It felt like anyone with something to say had the freedom to create a stage somewhere. To be honest, what I loved most about those years was the non-negotiating approaches in theatre making that went beyond any kind of populism and that feeling of not needing anyone’s approval; not having to infiltrate closed-off institutions or elite spaces just to become a theatre maker felt like a great freedom we collectively fought for and won.
Of course, there were many productions whose artistic value could be questioned. But we also witnessed the rise of groups that pursued an aesthetic shaped by the need to expose the sins of the country, especially from the ’80s and ’90s. Young people who had grown up witnessing coups, torture, and massacres in Türkiye were now using tools of theatre to talk about those traumas. The dominant tone was a sense of responsibility rather than populism.
These were the years I was watching four or five plays a week as a theatre critic. It felt like every group was creating theatre in different venues but with the same spirit, as if they were all tipping their hats to one another. Some were even turning their own homes into performance spaces. For example, in 2014, we saw a performance in an apartment flat used as a residence in Istanbul’s Harbiye neighbourhood. It was Teklif (Proposal), staged by Tiyatro Pol, founded by Burcu Halaçoğlu. It was a performance held in a real living space, with the audience limited to 15 people. There was such a strong desire to tell authentic stories.
These were years when anyone who could endure the material and emotional strain was finding a way to build a stage or collaborate with an independent theatre company. In Istanbul, groups like BeReZe and Ekip Tiyatrosu were sharing their stories in venues run by theatre collectives like Kumbaracı50, Mekân Artı, ikincikat, and Seyr-î Mesel (made by another Kurdish collective). Not having a permanent venue was difficult, but it felt like everyone had each other’s backs. Those without a space could still rent one and perform their work. And just when we were mostly focused on Istanbul’s independent theatre scene, a team would emerge from Ankara with a tour de force that could influence all this ecosystem. This is the ensemble that started out as Domus Sanat Çiftliği and, since May 2014, continues on its path as Mek’an Sahne. They expanded the boundaries, stretching the theatre field beyond Beyoğlu, the symbolic heart of Istanbul, and redefining the landscape of theatre making. Among the founders were Şâmil Yılmaz, Pelin Temur, Meli Yılmaz, and Serdest Vural. Because of this theatre company the Istanbul audience also became aware of the presence of alternative venues in Ankara. The ensemble had a deep awareness of the harm the country’s political climate inflicted on various individuals and identities, and they never ignored this truth while shaping their theatrical voice. Their productions often featured original queer interpretations, and whenever they toured in Istanbul, their shows were consistently sold out. One of their shows, Kadınlar Aşklar Şarkılar (Women, Loves, Songs) in particular became something of a cult, mostly because of Meli Yılmaz’s unforgettable performance. Mek’an Sahne expanded the boundaries, stretching the theatre narrative beyond Beyoğlu and redefining the landscape. It was such an exciting time that I find myself getting swept up in the excitement again, even as I tell it now.
Can you talk about the role of Beyoğlu during that time?
As you know, Beyoğlu has always been one of the places where the political climate of the country is reflected almost instantly. It was even more so back then. Most theatre venues were (and still are) located there. The early 2010s were relatively more peaceful years in the country, politically, economically and socially. There was even a brief period of cautious optimism due to the Peace Process (2012-2015).
At that time, you could sit in the middle of Taksim and watch a Kurdish-language play (Disco 5 No’lu) about the torture that once took place in Diyarbakır Prison during the nightmarish martial law years, 1980-83. While that show was being performed, just a few hundred meters away, hunger strike solidarity protests were happening in front of Galatasaray High School. Or in another play İz (Trace), we encountered the events of September 6–7 in 1955, a pogrom against non-Muslim minorities of Beyoğlu (especially Greek-Orthodox people), which is one of Türkiye’s shameful historical episodes. It was told as part of collective memory connecting the 1950s, the 1980s (year of the infamous military coup), and 2010s (realtime of the audiences). And we watched it right in the heart of the neighbourhood where all these events took place, inside a building whose architecture matched the spirit of the play. You also mentioned these plays in your thesis when unpacking all these complicated contexts.
Of course, as this wave of productions gained momentum, it also brought a kind of sameness, a form of similarity. And this led to a period of self-criticism, for which at the time Alternative Theatre Venues Joint Initiative organised panel discussions for.
While these ‘free and small theatre venues’ were being praised for their contribution to contemporary theatre, some people within this ecosystem were also against romanticizing or excusing their financial and physical limitations; they acknowledged how projects were starting to resemble one another and how, under a blanket of idealism, the unpaid labour of volunteers was made invisible.
These self-critiques gave rise to new movements. As people began to question the downsides of having so many venues settled in Beyoğlu, we started to see alternative spaces emerging in other neighbourhoods, places like Mecidiyeköy (such as SahneHal), Fatih (such as Su Gösteri Sanatları Sahnesi), Kadıköy (such as Emek Sahnesi) and Beşiktaş (Ezop Sahne). These were the districts where there weren’t many alternative theatre venues at that time. I think it won’t be an exaggeration to say it was a creative boom that couldn’t be controlled. Of course, it came with its share of damage. But like I said before, that sense of irreverence, of doing things without asking for permission, felt like a necessary kind of defiance. It really matched the spirit of the time.
How many plays did you write until now? Can you give us their titles and short summaries?
Actually, the number of plays I wrote which are staged isn’t that high. Only two of them have been produced so far. The other plays I’ve written were mostly presented as staged readings as part of various festivals and events. For example, İsli Yaprak Sarması (Smoked Stuffed Vine Leaves) has received critical acclaim, won an award, and even represented Türkiye in the 36th Heidelberg Stückemarkt in Germany as part of playwriting competition in 2019, but it still hasn’t been staged. One of the greatest news about this play is that it was adapted into a radio drama. I think it’s a very nostalgic and powerful way to allow people to listen to the story. In fact, because of the radio drama, the play also caught the attention of one of the theatre critics from mainstream media. Acclaimed theatre critic Bahar Çuhadar dedicated an entire page of her column to a review of the text and added her wish to see it on stage as soon as possible. The published date of that review was 2021. Anyway, everyone speaks highly of the script, but no one has produced it yet! So it continues its journey as a text, rather than as a theatre performance.
I’ll come back to Smoked Stuffed Vine Leaves later. Let us talk a little about the ones that have been performed.
My first staged play is Merheba, a word that means “hello” in Kurdish, and is almost the same word in Turkish, Merhaba, with just one letter different.
Merheba is a loose adaptation based on the short story “Compass Needle” from Galician writer Sèchu Sende’s book Made in Galiza. The book was translated into Kurdish under the title Di xwenan de jî ez ê zimanê xwe winda nekim (I won’t lose my language, not even in my dreams). As part of the Language Plays Project, we produced three plays between 2014 and 2015 based on that book; Merheba was the first one.
Sende’s characters explore the theme of not being able to speak Galician, his native language. I also drew inspiration from other stories of the same book, as well as from guides like “Practical Tips for Learning to Speak Galician.” The struggle around language feels like something anyone, anywhere can relate to, whether you’re Māori in Aotearoa, Galician in Spain, or Kurdish in Türkiye. In the original story, the search for language is told through the metaphor of a compass needle. The character leaves home in hopes of finding one. This became the starting point for Merheba’s main character. Originally written as a male character, we eventually changed the character into a woman during the dramaturgical process.
What was the reason for the change?
It really came from the process itself. What emerged was a female character who longs for something, who has the courage to pursue what she’s lost, and who refuses to give up despite all obstacles. I tried to ground her search for her mother tongue in the encounters of everyday life: the corner store, the butcher, the carpenter… Her journey unfolds through interactions in different shops around a neighbourhood. Everyone she speaks to becomes a witness to the language that’s been lost. She walks in and says in her language: “Merheba, rojbaş, min derziyeke pusûleyan divê.” (Hello, good morning, I’m looking for a compass needle. Do you have one?). Everyone sends her to another shop. For some, this compass needle is familiar, but for others, it’s something completely unknown and strange. Even though the whole play is built on a metaphor, I worked hard to write the dialogue in a very natural, everyday tone. I tried to capture how daily life in a neighbourhood shapes how people use or lose language.
Were you involved in the staging process? How did that process work?
I tried not to be involved, or maybe I simply wasn’t included much. To be honest, the staging process was actually a very interesting and painful journey for me. I don’t think I would have been shaken this much even if director Mehmet Atak had literally slapped me in the face. Everything I tried not to do while writing, he did while staging it. He used the text as a tool for everything he wanted to emphasise in this show. On top of a story about a woman chasing after her language, he piled on militarism, toxic masculinity, violence, philosophy, music, video, and dance. It was too much for my text to carry.
Trying to convey all of the country’s issues by loading them onto a single text, a single character, was something I always tried to avoid. While Atak was doing this, the character completely disappeared. As the writer, I was completely absent. In fact, he didn’t really engage with my text at all. He was trying to realise a vision he had been building in his own mind for years, using this project as an opportunity. I was so inexperienced and confused that I couldn’t even argue. After all, the “great director” who was always on the side of the oppressed had come to direct a play for a Kurdish theatre company, offering all his resources and connections without expecting any financial compensation. Who were we to say anything? It was exhausting for me and for the artistic directors of the company. But in the end, all we could do was to thank him. He had, after all, graciously “blessed” us by directing our play.
His directorial vision was too much for my text to hold. I’m not sure how to phrase it exactly, but in my view, it was artistically overwrought, melodramatic, emotionally manipulative, and lacking in subtlety. That said, the performances by the actors (Nagihan Gürkan, Erdem Kaynarca, and Burcu Eken) were truly remarkable. They had a deep understanding of the text and the intentions behind the characters, and despite the difficult working conditions, they delivered an outstanding piece of work. Everyone whose name appears in the credits put real effort into the production. They all deserve much more than just thanks.
Ah! premiered in 2023 as part of a project titled Istanbul Mon Amour at the International Istanbul Theatre Festival (IKSV), which is perhaps the most significant theatre festival of the country. The play was first staged in the theatre hall of Galatasaray High School in İstanbul’s Beyoğlu neighborhood. This is the school where the relatives (Saturday Mothers/People) of the disappeared gather on the front door every Saturday (here I can’t stop but remind the reader of performance scholar Diana Taylor’s work ¡Presente!: The Politics of Presence in which she argues how some political absences are omnipresent).
For the past two years, under the project direction of Ahmet Sami Özbudak, it has continued to be performed alongside other monologues at Yuvakimyon Greek-Orthodox Girls’s High School and in various heritage buildings around Istanbul. I highlight the venues because the stories we tell always intersect with the history of these places. All of these venues have an organic connection with the monologues we put on stage. I wrote this monologue, but honestly, I find it emotionally difficult to even read it. The character is fictional, but the time and place are real. The play takes place on one of the darkest days in Türkiye’s recent history, a day when continuing to live “as if nothing happened” became impossible.
It’s July 20, 2015, the day so many of our friends, young people we didn’t yet know personally, but somehow we also knew well through our roots and are deeply connected with, were killed. It’s almost impossible to build a life out of that day. This play is a kind of questioning of how any of us managed to survive that kind of darkness. It follows a single day in the life of a woman at work. But in telling that story, it also reveals the meaning of being a witness. I believe we need to keep remembering those who are no longer with us. And after all the things we’ve witnessed in the last ten years, from so many angles, how can one write a poem or a play as if none of it ever happened?
How do you write? What is your process of writing?
You know that line by Oruç Aruoba, “a person who has lost their place is forced to set out on a journey.” I think that’s how it begins for me. Because more than anything, it’s a feeling of not belonging that sparks the writing process. Then the stories start to take shape. As the issues I’m dealing with turn into stories, it feels like I’ve found a roof over my head, a kind of shelter. And even if it’s uneasy, writing gives me a strange sense of home. So, before I sit down to write a play, I sit down to write a story. And later I often realise that the plays I intended to write are actually woven from the dramatic structure of those stories.
That’s exactly how Smoked Stuffed Vine Leaves came to be. It’s an adaptation of a literary short story I wrote. Merheba is based on Sechu Sende’s stories, but the character I created there is also actually a guest from one of my own short stories that was once published in Varlık (in its October 2011 issue), which is Türkiye’s longest-running literary magazine, established in 1933. That’s exactly how Smoked Stuffed Vine Rolls came to be. So yes, I can say that my writing process is very much built on solidarity between literary and theatre texts.
Let’s focus on Smoked Stuffed Vine Rolls again. Would you mind explaining to us the plot and also the unique structure of the play? How did you write this play? What experiences, observations, inspirations guided you into writing this very interesting account of womanhood in Türkiye?
It was my first few months in New Zealand in 2017. I spent my days travelling on a low budget and my remaining time in libraries. I was restless, carrying unresolved things from Türkiye on my shoulders. I was writing short stories.
One day, I came across a playwriting competition held by Mitos Boyut. I checked the jury and saw that they were all people whose work I respected. What made me consider applying was the fact that submissions would be read anonymously. That mattered to me, because to be honest, I don’t find most competitions transparent in Türkiye. Like many other industries, the same people always dominate the theatre industry. It’s a space where some colleagues complain about not being able to meet deadlines for commissioned plays, while others — maybe even much better writers — struggle just to have their work noticed. So in an environment like that, what can a non-anonymous playwriting contest even offer? But I always regarded Mitos Boyut differently. I also knew your play Kaşıntı (The Itch) had received an award from this competition, and that no one on the jury knew who you were. The recognition came purely from the strength of the writing. That gave me faith in the integrity of the process. So I decided to adapt one of my short stories into a play. The story follows a few women who are trying to survive while hiding in an apartment, and the children who are forced to share that uncertainty with them. It all takes place in a single location, so all I had to do was reshape it into a dramatic structure.
But the writing process became painful, because adapting the story meant confronting the truths of my homeland all over again. I felt like I knew every one of the characters. I approached them with deep care. At first, I even felt guilty for putting them all under the same roof. I knew how difficult it is to imagine a kind of life, continuing in a tight physical space, full of unresolved trauma and pain. Yet I was also aware of the vitality that can be found in small things, the smell of food cooking, the sound of a key turning in a door, a bit of friendly conversation. I knew that the will to live doesn’t always belong to the territories of comfort.
The more I wrote, the more that spark of life within the characters touched me. Wounded souls clinging to one another, their resilience lifted by the scent of vine leaves stuffed and simmering on the stove. That dish, that smell, seemed to carry a kind of joy that made everything bearable. At the end, the play was placed among the winners at the competition and my work became visible through publication.
I find Smoked Stuffed Vine Rolls quite important because I feel like it is one of the cases where “subaltern” could speak (perhaps in an anti-Spivakian gesture), and what it expresses is new for Turkish-language playwriting. Your characters speak very differently compared to other feminist playwrights’ women characters, say Zehra İpşiroğlu, Zeynep Kaçar, Emre Koyuncuoğlu, Yeşim Özsoy, Seray Şahiner, Sevilay Saral or Jale Karabekir. How do you think your work contributes to the feminist canon in Türkiye from a unique perspective?
Thank you for these words. It means a lot to me if “subaltern could speak” in my play. So, as a fellow playwright, what is your own opinion about how my characters speak differently?
In Smoked Stuffed Vine Rolls you wrote about women in a hidden shelter arranged by a middle-class feminist organization from the point of view of the woman hiding there to eventually build another life for themselves. Women in the shelter all come from lower classes and some are clearly Kurdish. Each woman there has a story of deep-cutting violence and in a Spavikian fashion there is also one character that everyone talks about but she, herself, never talks. She is talked about, she can’t speak for herself, since “the subaltern cannot speak.” Yet the other woman in the shelter, who survived similar, multiple and intersectional cases of violence can speak for themselves. And they are quite critical in their own way about not just patriarchal violence but also about the middle classness of the feminist organization that tries their best to help them yet cannot be enough sometimes due to their own lack of understanding the issues at hand.
Since I know that you are a good reader in Turkish and that you are much more familiar with the concept of “white feminism” than I am, I’d like to benefit a bit more from your analysis then. Can you explain a bit more about the elements that made you feel that way?
Yes, I am happy that I suggested Rafia Zakaria’s book, Against White Feminism to you, to be able to locate the difference of your intersectional feminist approach within Turkish-language feminist playwriting together. In your play one character mocks the high brow language of some of these middle and upper middle class women, which dissects the insincerity of their solidarity which reduces their work into charity, almost a socially responsible hobby rather than a real political fight. I was mostly interested in the language you constructed, how your character Refika mocks how one of the middle class feminists use of the word “rencide” – which means “to offend” – in her supposedly sensitive talk to her after she brings a bunch of other middle and upper middle class women to meet Refika for her to just start telling – or rather performing – her “sad story.” When Refika simply refuses by leaving the situation, the same woman approaches her to apologize in an insincere way, asking if she “offended” her or not. This entire scene and the choice of the highbrow word “rencide” which actually has such little capacity to do justice to the injustice caused against Refika in this situation, was striking for me. Zakaria actually writes about a very similar anecdote in her book, where the injustices done against Black and brown women are used by white feminism to showcase how supposedly “white patriarchy is so much better to white women,” which helps to make white women more docile in their own oppression. In this case it is the violence done against a Kurdish lower-class woman who is tried to be showcased to middle and upper middle class Turkish women, to reaffirm their own status. But Refika can speak for herself, not only with discourse but also with her body, and when she refuses the offensive offer, her silent yet strong gesture says more than all the highbrow Turkish discourse thrown at her to make the situation appear “gently inconsiderate.”
I consider myself to be a good reader in Turkish. I do sense it immediately when writers write about people they do not know well. Of course, not all of these texts are immediately bad, but there is a different kind of depth when I know the writer is in command of language because they have a grasp of exactly what they are talking about. So, when I was reading the play, I knew it was written by someone that has a different gendered experience than mine – the language wasn’t flattened by assumptions and truisms. I want you to unpack this element with me perhaps. What makes Fatma Onat a different voice amongst the feminist playwrights of Türkiye?
I was really touched by this analysis and the way you connected with the play so deeply. Thanks for that. Part of my childhood in Istanbul was spent on Ortaklar Street in Mecidiyeköy. I specified the street because it’s a neighbourhood largely shaped by the urban middle class. It was an area where people’s income and cultural level were higher compared to other neighbourhoods in the same district. My two uncles and their families migrated from a village in Şirvan, a district of Siirt in the country’s southeast, to Istanbul. I was also sent from Şirvan to live with my uncles in Istanbul for a better education. My uncles had moved into a poorly maintained ground-floor apartment in that neighbourhood, most likely through relatives who had come to the city earlier. That’s probably how they were able to settle in this neighbourhood. By the way, over the years, one of my uncles, who still lives there with his family, turned it into a lovely, comfortable place, with a small, beautiful garden in the middle of the buildings. Anyway, it felt like maybe we were kind of disrupting the neighborhood’s picture a little. The fact that two families from a Kurdish province (or three, if you count my sister and me as a family) were living in that neighbourhood wasn’t something very ordinary for the community. It was a crowded house like the house where I was born in my hometown. But the feeling was totally different, somehow, wherever we had come from, we clearly didn’t quite fit in that neighbourhood. Even as a child, I always felt uncomfortable with the way people there tried to “liberate” us and my aunts. They would encourage my aunts to take off their traditional headscarves, called yazma or tulbent, randomly give them makeup products as gifts, or try to explain that wearing lipstick was completely normal. Meanwhile my aunts were mostly concerned with politely asking our neighbours not to throw their cigarette butts and garbage downstairs. I mean, that make-up stuff really wasn’t my aunts’ issue at the time.
As people who had to squeeze into a tiny apartment after coming from spacious villages, as you can guess, their concern was likely to be something else entirely. And besides, my aunts were already bright and beautiful women, I knew they were perfectly capable of dressing up if they wanted to. I realise those “liberated” women upstairs meant well, but we used to find their efforts to teach my aunts “civilisation” during two coffee breaks pretty ridiculous, especially their determination to remove my aunts’ traditional headscarves in the name of liberating them. Some even tried to teach them to read and write. At the time, my uncle’s home probably had a better library than anyone else’s in the building. Later, when an ordinary neighbourly dispute turned into Kurdish–Turkish tension, we destroyed that library as a family, fearing a possible house raid. Maybe because of this memory, a lot of well-intentioned efforts in the world of artistic production remind me of those well-meaning women upstairs.
Coming back to your question that brought up this memory for me; the character Refika in Smoked Stuffed Vine Leaves is a victim of a patriarchal structure, but she also refuses to be a victim of that kind of “good intention.” There are people who want to help her, but the methods they choose risk completely upending her life.
Beyond that risk, these well-meaning efforts don’t always feel good to the people they’re aimed at. Gratitude is a heavy burden. Refika is a worker in that household; all she wants is to be paid for her work and to continue with her life without drawing much attention. At least for a while. She’s not asking for help. But the woman of the house insists on “lending a hand.” She even has a full project for “liberating Refika”. But that project could completely destroy Refika, since she needs that secrecy at that moment. That’s what the character objects to.
I’m familiar with Refika. She’s not a character I created by observing, analysing, or doing research. In my writing, I usually focus on the representations of characters whose voices I can hear, people I can naturally pass by in everyday life, people I can talk to organically. That’s why I want them to speak. I want it to be clear that even in their silence, they have so much to say. My goal is usually to make sure that no one can steal the agency of these voices, at least in their representation, voices that, in reality, are constantly bent and twisted by others. I’m not sure if this makes me different or if it’s a matter of not being brave enough. I mean, I don’t have the courage to step into lives whose voices I haven’t heard up close before. I’ve always preferred to stay on familiar ground. And also now I’m not sure if I’ve lost track of or actually answered your question.
You immigrated to Aotearoa New Zealand in 2017 and then you studied at Auckland University of Technology in the Faculty of Māori & Indigenous Development. What do you think you learned while studying in that department? And what do you think you brought in with your own knowledge to the ecosystem of the department?
Te Ara Poutama faculty became like a second home for me. It was one of the places where I felt most comfortable in New Zealand. Even though I was clearly “the most foreign” person in the faculty, I never felt like an outsider. It felt less like an institution and more like a place where I could truly feel a sense of belonging. We held most of our classes in the marae. You can think of the marae as a community gathering place. It’s a space that can adapt to the needs of the community, and having classes there really strengthened the organic connection between us and the faculty members. Since the students doing work in the department were mostly adult professionals, many of them Māori, the postgraduate classes were held on weekends. Students coming from outside Auckland would arrive on Friday and stay at the university’s marae to be able to attend classes.
The faculty structure encourages insiders (Māori and Indigenous people) to do academic work. During these day-long classes, even your tea, coffee, and food needs were covered by the department. As someone like me, a foreign student who has to cover higher costs in every area, this generosity and hospitality were truly incredible.
Being in a space where everyone was Māori or Indigenous, and me being a Kurdish person from Türkiye, we would often reflect together with my professors on what Fatma could contribute. Your support and that of my friend Duygu Çelik from Munzur University were very important. In fact, everything began when you directed me to Sharon Mazer, if you remember.
Yes, both Sharon and I contributed to The Palgrave Handbook of Theatre and Race, that’s how I got to learn about her work. It was a good coincidence: she wrote about Maori theatre in Aotearoa New Zealand, and I wrote about the 2010s alternative theatre in İstanbul which tackled the issue of Kurdish-Turkish conflict. These were plays produced by some of the groups that you were also part of, such as Şermola Performans.
Yes, a productive coincidence indeed. Sharon is the head of the performance department at the university. Of course, with a bit of naïve confidence, I initially thought I could jump straight into comparative studies, but the faculty was careful about this. For an outsider to engage in such work, a strong background is needed. Saying, “Hi, I came to study the similarities between Kurdish theatre in Türkiye and Māori theatre in New Zealand,” would have been not only naïve but perhaps even disrespectful. My lecturers were very supportive. The encouraging attitudes of Hinematau McNeill, Teena Brown Pulu, and Elisa Duder helped me overcome my anxiety and find my path. They created space for me to do performance work under the Māori Faculty. They first wanted to see what I already had to offer. I had professors who cared not only about what they could give you but also about what you could bring to the faculty. I can say they gave me space to lay all my cards on the table.
How do you think your playwriting has changed since you moved to New Zealand?
I think I can’t give a very precise answer to this question because my writing style and the issues I focus on change depending on the experiences I am going through in different periods of my life and how I’m feeling. But I can say this, from the day I arrived until just a few years ago, my texts were mostly focused on the problems of my homeland, Türkiye. I didn’t have much opportunity to focus on what I was experiencing here. I wrote Smoked Stuffed Vine Leaves and Ah! while I was here. Most of my still-unpublished texts also revolve around the same concerns. It felt like, the more I wrote in this “host” country and the more I removed the burdens I brought with me, the lighter I became.
However, in the meantime, without realising it, a whole new load starts to settle onto your shoulders. I think it’s only in the last few years that I’ve become aware of the fact that I’m a migrant. I noticed that I’ve started shaping my new texts through the lens of the places I’ve migrated to. I’m only just beginning to really feel that I live in Aotearoa New Zealand, in this small, green country. I think all of these things came to light in the play we co-wrote with you and Ayşe Bayramoğlu.
Yes, while we wrote Autumn in New Stockholm with you and with Ayşe, we unpacked a lot of experiences about – not just border-crossing but ocean-crossing – immigration. You were the one who initiated the project at the beginning. What were you hoping or imagining when you made the suggestion to us? Considering that the project is finished now, do you think we have fulfilled your initial vision or moved away from it?
Autumn in New Stockholm was the longest creative process I’ve ever experienced in my writing life. It was painful, but what it gave me in return was immense. Honestly, I never expected it to grow this much. I initially thought we’d just write a text with two other playwright friends that could reflect the situation we were in. I hadn’t dreamed much beyond that. But your boundary-pushing attitude from Canada expanded the process and journey of the text. It was painful because we thought we were going to write a play for fun, but the weight of years, the burden of the migrant experience, the deepening of our friendship, our laughter, our tears, and our arguments took me to completely different places. You too, I think? We truly bore witness to each other’s lives in the countries we migrated to.
Yes, it was a special process for me too. I think it allowed all of us to collectively relocate ourselves in this world as playwrights.
Think about it, I had no idea I’d be doing my post-study in my late-thirties in a language I had only just started learning. Then, suddenly, with your support, I found myself on unimaginable paths. Like being thrown into the sea without knowing how to swim, I often turned to you and Ayşe when I was struggling. And you know, one of the most tragic parts of being a migrant is that you’re ashamed to share your troubles with your loved ones back home. Because due to the geography they live in, their problems always appear heavier than yours. So, you grit your teeth and try to cope with everything alone where you are. It’s something that really isolates you. But our regular meetings always made me feel stronger. It was exhausting, of course. A few years ago, I used to say that this playwriting process aged me.
Me too. I am older in every way also – due to the years and experience it took.
But now I feel like it made me braver. It gave me the strength to deal with the hardships of being a migrant. Because we didn’t just write a play. I feel like we wrote a three-volume novel. We witnessed each other’s difficult years and shared our burdens. We entered a kind of solidarity that made us feel strong, both emotionally and materially.
The artistic side also turned into a process that deeply influenced my way of seeing. We come from the same country and share the same conscience, but I believe our social backgrounds, family structures, and childhoods, shaped in different regions of the country, have created emotional and artistic differences between us. We found ourselves expressing the same emotions in very different ways in our writing. At times, it felt like an avant-gardist, an expressionist, and a naturalist had come together to write a play for expressing the Zeitgeist of the 2020s. The fact that we were able to accept each other’s creative differences and still continue and finish the project—I think that’s a great success.
We also had a very supportive team around us who actually stretched their limits to make sure we can finish this work together. Some of them were early career artists and some of them mid-career like us, and then there was Şehsuvar Aktaş whom we all considered a master of the medium. Would you like to explain who did what in this very long creation process?
Like you highlighted, Şehsuvar Aktaş’s contributions were significant. As the dramaturg of the team, and a very important theatre person since early 2000s, he was deeply involved in the process and supported the development of the text. I really enjoyed the experience of co-writing with a dramaturg, thanks to our collaboration. Maybe that’s why I’m now working with Nevra Ayşem Savaşçı for the play I’m currently writing. She’s both an actor and a dramaturg. We started by writing the text specifically for her as a performer, but she’s also contributing to the process as a dramaturg. Thanks to Autumn in New Stockholm, I got to taste not only the pains of co-writing a single text with multiple writers but also the joy of developing it together with a dramaturg. Our director, Onur Karaoğlu, also made a great contribution—we completed the text together at the very last phase. And our project coordinator Halime Aktürk also supported the journey of the text immensely. Talking to you now, I’m reminded again of how many people poured their labour into this. A project that started with three people keeps growing, and our play will be staged next year in Montreal. The text, which was originally written in Turkish, is translated into Kurdish (by Alan Ciwan), and English (by you), will be produced in French (translated by İlknur Kurşunlugil). London (UK) based young director Büke Erkoç will direct our play in Montreal. I look forward to seeing that.
What kind of future do you see for yourself in Aotearoa New Zealand as a playwright? Do you think your plays can be staged there? Do you think there can be a diverse theatre community who not only wants to but also has the intellectual and emotional repertoire to engage with what you chose to tell them in this medium?
There are many issues on which we can’t find common ground with Kiwis who were born and raised here and have never experienced or been curious about a life beyond these borders. Of course, there is nothing wrong with that. Not having to push those boundaries, not having to see the world beyond all the green and blue of this beautiful island, that’s a big privilege. I can only envy that. But it does make it harder, sometimes, to even begin to understand each other.
That said, when it comes to storytelling by the “others” of this country, we often find common ground. Language, masculinity, conservatism, colonialism, homophobia, domestic violence… There is so much we share, especially with Māori storytellers. I feel an organic connection to Māori stories. For example, when I saw The Haka Party Incident on stage, I felt the pain and shame in that story deep in my bones. This play is based on a true story and tells the story of an action carried out by a group of Māori activists in 1979. After the show, I hugged a woman sitting behind me, neither of us spoke, but she had been sobbing throughout. We shared a kind of shared collective memory that came through with catharsis.
As for my own work, maybe Smoked Stuffed Vine Leaves isn’t so easy to stage here. I want to hope that perhaps this is my misjudgment, but the story of women confined to an apartment, constantly under threat of male violence, doesn’t feel like something that would resonate with the mainstream (or even activist) audiences here – or worse, it can be dismissed as a “Middle Eastern problem.”
Maybe I’m wrong, we need to try to stage a play like that to see how it goes. But I do believe my other plays could find an audience here. That includes our collective text Autumn in New Stockholm. I also find the second part of the question particularly important: whether we can meet on a common ground that allows for an emotional and intellectual repertoire to engage with each other’s stories truly… Isn’t that what theatre is partly for? Not just as a platform for artistic display, but as a way to close the distance between us and make sense of life together, even though we’re all coming from different political and cultural dynamics. Of course, there’s also an institutional framework here that defines these relationships, and this is immigration.
The system is built in a way that makes you forget who you actually are. I started as a tourist, became a student and hospitality worker… and the best I can become is a restaurant manager. This whole trajectory is based on the idea, kind of illusion, that all these steps will eventually lead you to becoming a Kiwi. But it’s also a system that constantly reminds you of where you came from. You end up struggling within a structure that doesn’t organically make you part of it, trying to hold on to who you are in the process without making a cliche out of your own lived experience. If immigration policies ease up a little, then yes, contributing to this culture as a Kurdish playwright and dramaturg from Türkiye, and finding a shared repertoire and language, becomes much more possible.
*Fatma Onat graduated from the Theatre Criticism and Dramaturgy Department at Istanbul University’s Faculty of Letters. She completed her postgraduate studies at Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand, within the Faculty of Te Ara Poutama. A national award-winning playwright from Türkiye, she works primarily as a dramaturg, playwright, and theatre critic.
**Deniz Başar is a theatre researcher, puppet maker, translator and playwright from Türkiye. In 2014, she received one of the most acclaimed playwriting awards in Türkiye for her play The Itch. In 2019, her play In the Destructible Flow of a Vast, Monolithic Moment was stage-read in Revolution They Wrote feminist theatre festival in Montreal. She received her PhD from Concordia University’s Humanities Department in 2021, and she was an FRQSC post-doctoral fellow in Boğaziçi University between 2021-2023. Her play Wine and Halva, was staged in Montreal in 2024 in partnership between Postmarginal Theatre and Toronto Laboratory Theatre, and in association with Sort of Productions. Wine and Halva was nominated for Outstanding Independent Production at the Montreal English Language Awards (META) in 2024. Her latest collaborative play co-written with Fatma Onat and Ayşe Bayramoğlu, Autumn in New Stockholm, was published in 2023 as a trilingual edition (Turkish, Kurdish, and English) and distributed across the Canadian library system. Autumn in New Stockholm will be staged in Escape La Risée (Montreal) soon, in its French translation, as a co-production of Sort of Productions and NOKNOK!. Currently, Deniz is working in the Foundations Development Program of Sabancı University.
Copyright © 2025 Fatma Onat and Deniz Başar
Critical Stages/Scènes critiques, #32, December 2025
e-ISSN: 2409-7411
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